Less News Is Good News
I’ve been really busy lately, so I had to find a way to gain some more time. So I started by eliminating feeds from my RSS reader. What did I cut?
Every feed that regurgitates news, comments on news, has nothing but opinion on news, etc. There’s simply no reason to hit 3 fora and 30-300 blogs all letting me know that Terry Semel is no longer the CEO of Yahoo.
So I started looking for ‘actionable’ items that get posted and it was no surprise when I found that very little of what is written around the Web is news you can use. I’m not going to list each forum or blog, but do yourself a favor, run down the list of blogs and fora you read regularly, take a look at the headlines and see how much of that news you can actually use.
I’ve also made a decision not to post the types of items that I found were simply consuming time without offering up something useful. So if you see a ‘news’ post here, call me on it. ; )
That’s not to say that won’t post items that I find odd or interesting, like words with interesting origins or definitions, but there won’t be any ‘Google buys yet another company’ posts.
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Pingback on Jul 9th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
[…] And don’t forget to read the blog post that inspired Ryan Clark’s which can be found at Speaking Freely […]
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Pingback on Jul 9th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
[…] Less News Is Good News Speaking Freely Dean Thursday July 5th 2007 […]
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Pingback on Jun 20th, 2010 at 7:13 pm
[…] SpeakingFreely which is a GREAT blog posted yesterday on something I’ve been meaning to talk about. I’ve been really busy lately, so I had to find a way to gain some more time. So I started by eliminating feeds from my RSS reader. What did I cut? Every feed that regurgitates news, comments on news, has nothing but opinion on news, etc. There’s simply no reason to hit 3 fora and 30-300 blogs all letting me know that Terry Semel is no longer the CEO of Yahoo. […]
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Speaking Freely 
July 6, 2007 at 12:55 am
This is the kind of thing you will kick yourself for not doing a long time ago. I just eliminated 15 feeds out of a meager 39. I’m going beyond the 80/20 rule here just because I think it’s well worth it. I find myself looking at blogs more and more for this very reason. I used to be a forum junkie and spent most of the day sifting through bad opinions on recent headlines. It wasn’t until I started utilizing the RSS reader that a new world opened up. Now I get comments all the time from people during conversation, “How did you know that?” and “Where do you find these things”.
The last 8 books I have read/bought have been blog author recommendations. And they were phenomenal books.
It’s the Digg theory, Find people who’s insight you value and if they find it interesting it might be worth checking out.
July 6, 2007 at 1:30 am
Oh come, surely 300 different takes on a Google employee sneezing is worth the read? ;)
I’m finding myself in the same position these days – too busy to post or read much and I’ve noticed a lot lately that even the more popular SEO related news sites like SEW, SEL, etc have a lot of fairly naff self promotional “articles” popping into the mix as well. With TW dying I’d say there is a pretty good market out there for a decent news aggreator type site to fill the void.
MG
July 14, 2007 at 10:27 am
I decided that for a week I would take notes of new or valuable tips I picked up from the blogs I was reading and forums I visited.
4 days into it my notepad had only 3 entries, so I changed tack and categorized those “online resources” by news, education (this one), inspiration, etc.
I nuked the rss feed and just did drive-bys for the rest of the week. I found very little that was time sensitive or of huge value, so now I just allot a time frame to check up on a few places.